📘 Creative Strategy for Thinkers

Train your mind to build ideas—not just have them.

Based on William Duggan’s “Creative Strategy: A Guide for Innovation”
Adapted for Mindtrace Academy’s Mind Lab Series

🧠 Why this book?

We’ve all heard that creativity is about imagination, brainstorming, and lightning-bolt inspiration.

But what if that’s… wrong?

In Creative Strategy, Columbia Business School professor William Duggan offers a very different view:

The best ideas don’t come out of nowhere.
They come from recombining what you already know—strategically.

His model is based on how the human brain actually works.
Innovation isn’t magic. It’s memory, structure, and recombination.
And yes—you can train it.

🎯 Why it matters now

In a world full of AI-generated content and noise, it’s easy to look creative without really thinking.

You polish a paragraph, tweak your tone, rewrite a prompt—but something still feels… flat.

That’s not an AI problem. It’s a thinking problem.

What Creative Strategy gives us is a thinking system:
A way to take messy thoughts and turn them into structured, useful, original solutions.

At Mindtrace, we don’t teach creativity as flair.
We teach it as cognitive architecture.

🧱 The Core Framework: 3 Strategic Thinking Moves

Duggan breaks down creative problem solving into three powerful steps:

State the Problem and Its Elements
Break down the issue you’re facing into smaller, structural parts.
Don’t just say “I need a better idea”—say what kind of idea, where, why, and what’s stopping you.
The What-Works Scan
Search your memory, history, and examples from other fields.
Find things that worked before—not to copy, but to collect building blocks.
Creative Combination
Reassemble those elements into something new and fitting.
Insight happens when patterns collide. This is where strategy meets originality.

🤖 Why it’s more relevant in the AI age

AI can rephrase, reorganize, even suggest ideas.
But it cannot define your inner logic. It doesn’t know what you truly mean—or want.

AI improves your sentence.
Mind Lab improves your thinking.

We call this the difference between synthetic clarity and real clarity.
AI helps with polish. Mind Lab helps with purpose.

And when you combine both, you become unstoppable.

🛠️ How we use it at Mindtrace

We’ve turned Duggan’s 3-step model into a 5-part thinking program for Mind Lab.
Each part comes with:

A blog post that explains the logic
A downloadable template (Notion/Google Docs)
A real-world example
Optional journal prompts

Here’s the roadmap:

Step	Original Stage	Focus	Your Output
1	State the Problem	Break down what you’re really solving	🧱 Problem Structure Map
2	State the Elements	Extract components to work with	🧩 Element Checklist
3	What-Works Scan	Search for useful precedents	🔍 Insight Matrix
4	Creative Combination	Build a solution structure	🔗 Recombination Canvas
5	Resolution	Plan for action and delivery	🛠️ Strategy Blueprint

🧩 Who this helps

Students writing personal statements, theses, or research plans
Creatives overwhelmed with ideas but lacking structure
Strategists or educators facing complex or ambiguous problems
Anyone who feels like AI tools are fast—but not deep
People who want to train their mind, not just outsource it

📘 About the Author

William Duggan is a professor at Columbia Business School.
In Creative Strategy, he combines neuroscience, military history, and management research to show how “strategic intuition” works—and how to use it.

He defines innovation like this:

“The brain selects a set of elements from memory,
combines them in a new way,
and projects that new combination into the future as a course of action to follow.”

It’s not inspiration. It’s structure.

🧭 Final Take

You don’t need to “be more creative.”
You need a system to shape what you already know.

Mind Lab gives you that system—so your mind doesn’t just wander. It builds.